Almost in Paradise

9. Geographic disappointment

My legs are getting tired. This is the third day of travelling. Yesterday was crazy, and after leaving the festival we spent the rest of the day searching for another town where we could eat something. At last we found a small village where we ate and slept for the night. We also found me a disguise so that yesterday's incident won't happen again.

Right now we're walking through a forest (again). The slow wind is making my hair play gently around my face.

I look around me as I walk. This forest is quite beautiful. Its dark green moss and lighter leaves form a unique pattern, and when the golden sun shines down between the few openings it creates the warmest feeling you could ever feel in your body. Not just warm because it's the sun, but because it's too beautiful to exist. This is one of the the places I wish existed in my world. In my town.

"Hey, uhh, what was your name again?" Ban interrupts my thoughts.

"Chiyo Kouki" I answer.

"Ugh, another long name. Let's just go with the last part, Kouki" he says puts his hands in his pockets. The red jacket he earlier had torn up in the middle was now fixed without a trace of the injury and I have now idea of how that happened. "So, Kouki, what are you planning to do when we reach Camelot?"

"When we reach Camelot? Oh well... I'm not sure." I answer. "I didn't choose to come here (or well technically I willingly ran into the portal, but, you know) and for that I don't know what to do. My biggest dream would of course be to-"

I stop myself. No, I just can't say it out loud for some reason.

"To?" He says.

"Nothing. I don't know what to do."

We keep walking in silence until the trees start to separate and open up to a small empty village. We make our way into it and look around for people. A few houses are lit up, but in total, this village seem to be pretty poor.

I walk up to a place that looks like a store or bar or something and enter. There's a couple of tables and some chairs by which only an old man sits. The bartender or what I am to call him looks up at me when I come in, but he doesn't seem to care too much about me.

I'm about to ask him about the place when I see something on the wall to my right. I walk closer and to my luck it's two maps: one of Liones and one bigger map that includes all of Great Britain! Or maybe I should say Britannia...

I smile as I search for the "Here we are" sticker. I find a red dot to the north, in Scotland, and then looks for Camelot. It should be somewhere around here, right?

Thanks to my not-very-good-historical-geographic-intelligence I search right at the wrong places.

It's when I search further away from us that I see it. It's far, far to the south, down in England. "The Kingdom of Camelot" it says. Do we really have to walk all the way to there? It's freaking far away.

Watching the map makes a thought pop up in my head. Where are we going next? It must be... that way. I look at a way out of the village and it turns out to be into the only forest there is. The only forest? But then where did we come from?

I search for another forest over and over again in hope of that I'm just missing something, but I find nothing.

The place we came from! What was the name now again... Right! We left from Vanya village. I let my finger slide over the map of Liones and after a while I'm as close as I can be to Vanya. Then I compare the spot to where it possibly is on the bigger map. Then the panicking wave washes upon me.

I find Vanya village a few centimetres above the red dot.

This can only mean one thing... that we've gone the right opposite way than to Camelot.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. We can fix this, we'll just find a way to get to there.

I walk outside and find Ban, trying to get a pebble out of his shoe.

"Hey Ban" I say and he looks up. "We've got a whole map to climb down from."